"Pitiful helpless giant"

Who knew it would be so easy to collapse the Russian economy?

In 1970, Richard Nixon said, “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.” He used these words to justify an illegal war in Cambodia that may eventually have helped the genocidal Khmer Rouge to seize power, and certainly didn’t prevent it. The phrase “pitiful helpless giant” is a memorable one, coined by speechwriter Pat Buchanan, who as a columnist recycles it at regular intervals (and always attributes it, modestly, to Nixon). “Pitiful helpless giant”—I differ from Buchanan in believing the phrase works better without the comma—has often been used to illustrate the opposite point from the one Nixon and intended. In invading another country, a great military is always at risk of exposing itself as a pitiful helpless giant.

That’s where Russian President Vladimir Putin finds himself today. Russian forces may yet seize Kyiv—probably they will eventually—but even so, they have demonstrated sufficient difficulty invading Ukraine as to question Russia’s military might. Meanwhile, it took less than a week of war to collapse the Russian economy. It was actually in free fall even before the West announced this past weekend its actions against Russia’s central bank and its expulsion of selected Russian banks from SWIFT, the Belgium-based messaging system, owned by banks around the world, that’s used to move about half the world’s high-value payments across international borders. (For an interesting history of how SWIFT came into being—it was, among other things, an attempt to keep Citibank from taking over all of international banking—click here.)

My latest for The New Republic explains that Russia’s economy was weaker than we knew—destroying it was like blowing on a dandelion—and that economic sanctions, which a generation ago were considered a very ineffective tool of persuasion, have become, thanks to the rise of globalism and the computerization of everything, so powerful that even some centrists fear we’ve entered a new (dare one say imperialist?) era of U.S. leverage over the global economy that may eventually provoke a China-led overthrow of the dollar as the premier global currency. If that happens, we’re seriously screwed. But meanwhile, the U.S., Europe, and Japan are doing an excellent job of bringing Russia to its knees over its own, much more traditionally violent and brutal imperialist actions in Ukraine. Click here to read my piece.

Speaking of China, last week I wrote about how the Biden administration’s reports on repairing the global supply chain read collectively like a capsule history of how during the past generation China essentially became the global supply chain. We have the dollars, but they have the shipping containers, the lithium batteries, the solar panels, the printed circuit boards, etc., plus they clean for processing the fish we catch and the intestines of our hogs to make sausage casings, because Americans think that’s just too gross to do ourselves. Click here to read that piece.